Driving improvements by bringing science to leadership

The Ludwig Boltzmann Forum is a platform of leaders driving improvements based on logic and science. The Ludwig Boltzmann Forum is inspired by and held in honor of Ludwig Boltzmann – and organized under the leadership of Gerhard Fasol.

Ludwig Boltzmann Energy, entropy, leadership

Ludwig Boltzmann. Physicist. Mathematician. Philosopher.

Ludwig Boltzmann created much of our understanding of energy and entropy and he created many tools to work with energy, entropy, and gas.Ludwig Boltzmann is one of the most important physicists, mathematicians and philosophers.

He lived from February 20, 1844 – September 5, 1906 in Vienna, Graz, München, Leipzig and travelled intensely, three times to the USA.

Ludwig Boltzmann is most famous for linking the thermodynamically defined Entropy, which was essentially introduced to optimize steam engines, to the statistically defined entropy, based on the microscopic behavior of gas atoms and molecule – at a time, when the existence of atoms was not yet universally accepted.

Ludwig Boltzmann has also discovered many other laws of nature, and he has also developed many mathematical tools. For example, Ludwig Boltzmann’s Boltzmann-Equations are used as mathematical tools in the design of cars, airplanes and jet engines.

As a philosopher, Ludwig Boltzmann worked on the interactions of physics and philosophy, and in particular also insisted that questions such as whether our space is curved or not, or whether time is reversible, need to be answered by the tools of physics and mathematics, including experiments, not by philosophy.

Ludwig Boltzmann was intensely global, he studied English, traveled all over Europe and three times by train and ship to the United States of America, and was in intense correspondence with most scientific leaders of his time.